Re: Should we divide Debian to usable and unusable
ressu@uusikaupunki.fi (Sami Haahtinen) writes:
> the actual point was in my first mail, that programs that even the author
> doesn't feel that it should be released, shouldn't.
Well, what I read from a version below 1 is that the author thinks
that the product is not yet finished. That may be because she wants to
add more features, or get more testing, or fix more bugs. It does not
mean per se that it is not usable for anything[1], or that it should -
in the author's opinion - not be disseminated widely.
After all the author released the program to the world, so she
probably wants people to test it. Remember that `unstable' is
basically an alpha testing facility - therefore I don't think that
released software regardless of "finishedness" could be inappropriate
there. `stable' is another thing, though.
If an author wants to discourage packaging or redistribution of alpha
software, she may do so either informally in a README, or simply
disallow it via copyright. Debian maintainers will certainly respect
both.
Footnotes:
[1] For software I write, I usually start off with 0.1 for the first
version that does *anything* useful. In many cases, there was nothing
(nothing free, at least) for this purpose before, so I start using it
right away - others could profit from this, too.
--
Robbe
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